Yes, there is much you can do to transmute mud into brightness if you have enough time.

I love the variety of interpretations I find regarding time and our relationship to it, and here it is cast at its most helpful, as the element that can ‘ripen all’.

Of course, we know from Walter Raleigh and others that it also decays all, but let’s not muddy our spirits with such dank musings.

‘Truly, everything in this world depended on time.  Time ripened all.  If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit.’

Elsewhere, following the ripening theme, Kazantzakis describes time as immortal water irrigating the world.

Source: Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, trans. P.A. Bien (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 303

Photo credit: Jodie Morgan at unsplash.com